Hunting For a Tech Job In 2015
Nerval's Lobster writes It's a brand new year, and by at least some indications the economy's doing pretty well, which means that a lot of people will begin looking for a new, possibly better job. If you're looking to trade up, here are some tips, some of which are pretty standard-issue ("Update resume," etc.), and others that could actually stand you in good stead, including using the Bureau of Labor Statistics to judge the median salary for a position before negotiating with HR. According to Glassdoor, Dice, and other sources, the average salary for many kinds of tech workers will only rise over the next year, so it really could be a good time to see what's out there. Good luck.
The dice news website doesn't exactly jump out as being owned by dice (just that tiny logo in the upper left). Once again I made it about half way through before thinking "well this is stupid", and sure enough, good ole dice "news".
"and by at least some indications the economy's doing pretty well"
Which indications are those? Forgive me, but I don't watch CNBC.
Get the hell out of the tech industry. I went back to school, got my PharmD and couldn't be happier.
Better money too.
others that could actually stand you in good stead, including using the Bureau of Labor Statistics to judge the median salary for a position before negotiating with HR.
Wow, no, do not do that, the BLS statistics are LOW for huge sections of the United States. Remember, these are the numbers used to pay H1 visas, and they include jobs that aren't necessarily what you would think of when you think of a programmer (like the guy at my brother's company who gets paid $40k to write SQL queries, and not necessarily efficient ones. That's all he can do).
Secondly, when you are negotiating salary, always ask above the median (and that's assuming the median is correct). You can go lower later, but it's hard to negotiate higher than what you initially ask for.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The only people we hire now have relevant experience and skills in our very specific field, and experience commensurate for the position we are posting. We have sadly given up on new graduates; they are too flakey, having never held an actual job before, and needing substantial training to get to a point where they can generate revenue... and leave. Now is a great time for people that graduated around 2010, found a job in their field at terrible pay, and are now ready for an actual career.
Almost none of this matters. Makes me wonder where they get these guys with corroded Tech Jumper Cables. We don't hire people by looking at a tonne of CVs.
We hire people who can actually do what we need, and have proven that this is so. There are a number of ways to do that, and one is through your 'network' (which is why I said 'Almost'). Another is high profile FreeSoftware / OpenSource / OpenHardware / Papers / Patents.
Or, did you mean Tech as in, web site scripting? In which case, my response is that is not Tech any more than 'MicroSoft Word User' is Tech.
2 cents of this (actual) Tech CEO...
tldr: if you have to use dice to get a job you're already f***ed
There's nothing wrong with using "personify" in this sense. It's entry #1 in Merriam-Webster
"to conceive of or represent as a person or as having human qualities or powers"
"Anthropomorphize" is incorrect in this case. Saying the article has a face to punch would be anthropomorphizing it.
Maybe you should do your homework before criticizing others' usage.
I'd love to know what that CMPID at the end of the URL is.
Bad enough Dice shitposts their articles here, but are they seriously throwing stuff in the links to track the success of their self posting?
There's nothing wrong with using "personify" in this sense. It's entry #1 in Merriam-Webster
"to conceive of or represent as a person or as having human qualities or powers"
"Anthropomorphize" is incorrect in this case. Saying the article has a face to punch would be anthropomorphizing it.
Maybe you should do your homework before criticizing others' usage.
maybe you should respond to the part about the gay nigger. ignoring him just cause he's a nigger would be racist and thats bad.
I've always been disappointed in Dice.com since it's so full of slimy recruiting firms and even slimier head-hungers offering low-paying contracts. It's so full of Indian firms that it resembles a tech call-center from India and I don't bother anymore to list my resume there since I'll be flooded with worthless contracts in cities that I have no interest in working with. These worthless recruiters don't bother reading your profile or requirements (Perm-Only, Local Area Only) and just spam e-mail and call you with keyword matching crap short-term and low-paying contracts from cities across the nation that you have no interest in working in or moving to. Half the time I can't understand their thick Indian accents either and I wouldn't bother working with them if they can't even communicate well enough with them.
Dice.com is the slums of Tech Recruiting.
simply not true. New grads go begging.
College students reading this - avoid CS, and basically all STEM except the M.
You will not get a job worth the work, and you very well may not get a job at all.
I think the tech industry has painted itself into a corner. I had the misfortune to lose my job early in 2013 and spent almost the whole year looking before I found something; during that whole period I actually saw the same, relatively few jobs being readvertised over and over, with very little new showing up. The sector I was looking at was what you'd call 'devops', and it seemed like the companies were trying to get people with long experience in both development and system administration, but they weren't willing to pay more than what you'd pay for a middle ranking call-center operator. I can't quite imagine how anybody can imagine that being an attractive proposition to anybody with the qualifications.
So, it looks to me like a number of companies - almost all of them internet businesses - have painted themselves into a corner, where they deperately need highly qualified employees that they are never going to be able or willing to pay for.
Just because you worked on a project that used [insert product here] it does not make you an expert in that product OR even qualified to put it down on your CV
Over the past 3-4 years I have seen hundreds if not thousands of CV's coming out of India that contain huge amount of Bullshit if not downright lies.
Now we filter them out by asking them not overly difficult questions relating to the products they are supposed to be skilled in.
Even then some seem to slip through the net.
Many may be good on paper but totally lack initiative and problem solving skills.
Having spent 6 months this part year working in Jaipur/Mumbai and Chennai I have now a team of four recruiters working on supplying the CV's only of those who are up to the job AND (and this is really important) won't move on to another job as soon as they begin to get useful to the project.
They do this for CV Padding. Never mind the quality, feel the width.
Wall Street has been doing well because of all that Fed money that has been printed in the last few years. It has absolutely nothing to do with economic or business fundamentals. It was all bullshit money.
1. Hedge funds/billionaires being able to borrow at the Fed rate and at much higher margins than us peons (95% vs 50% for the rest of us) pumped the money into the stock markets.
2. All the money floating around was used by corporations to do stock buybacks - not because their businesses were worth investing in (contrary to the myth taught in Finance classes and spewed by corporate PR departments) but because it allowed the CEOs and billionaires to get even richer.
3. 1 & 2 were all done at our expense because it weakened the dollar - making consumer goods more expensive; while our wages haven't gone up. In the meantime, we are working longer and longer hours because in order to keep profits up, companies have been laying people off and making their current workforce work harder and longer.
A plan that was supposed to help us out and get employment back to 2007 levels has horribly failed.
There are several sites out there I use to research salaries such as glassdoor, salary.com, and payscale.com. They can give you a salary range for the company and job you are looking at. Are there any others out there you consider to be good?
Also, personally, I do not 'jump' unless there is at least a 10 pct pay increase. The stress of a new job does not make it worth it for me.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
you sound like another cunt-fuckin nigger lover
Maybe it's just me, but that post seemed more "gay nigger lover" to me.
The best thing about UDP jokes is I don't care if you get them or not
I see what you did there.
I sometimes ask revealing, often ignorant-seeming questions. Maybe they're harder to answer than you think.
This article however was painful to read
I took a look. It certainly won't help me as a young person and I can't exactly judge whether appearing "dated" is really that awful. Judging by how much the author thinks so, however, I can at least draw the meaningful conclusion that somebody sure thinks the industry is agist as shit.
Also, what the HELL is the keyboard in the image? Who has a trash can button on their keyboard, let alone a "down-right arrow" key?
Not sure why this is an anonymous discussion but considering some of phrases being batted around I think I'll oblige.
I will bite and point out that all the people out there a few years ago that said those people without social media accounts will, in time, have a difficult time obtaining employment. Some have even opined that not having a social media or Web presence indicates the candidate may be unstable, antisocial, you name it.
It's 2015. I have never, ever even been asked about social media in any interviews and I'm in IT. To be honest here, I also don't have even one social media account or a Web presence of any sort. I likely never will. Having social media accounts anymore means little to nothing anymore in my opinion. I cannot see how my not having one would negatively impact a decision to hire me if I can do the job. Now, a Web designer or coder might want to show their portfolio or GitHub account, but as a systems administrator, I have neither or those and need neither.
So, what does everyone think about this?
There's plenty of jobs out there for people with 3+ years of experience in things coming out in 2016.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
http://www.nagaiah.com/home.ph...
> I was on the job market for a little over 3 months in the southern US a few years ago.
Okay, so "a few years ago" you were looking for a job. So that's 2011-2013.
> I got my BS CS earlier in this decade ... though I've been in and out of industry to do other things.
So you got your degree in 2010-2012, meaning when you interviewed, you had close to zero years of experience actually doing anything in the field.
> can run circles around algorithm, logic, and design
You've never done anything like what we do every done, and have been doing for decades. You read a book about the system I designed, which means you can run circles around me, you think. To quote Adam Savage, "THERE'S your problem."
In your books at school, you might have read about the Morris-Pratt algorithm. You might have learned something about Apache. They may have mentioned the Linux kernel. That all prepares you to be able understand what I'm talking about when I tell you what changes I contributed to the kernel. Based on your study of what we've done, you might be able to look at the work I've done on Apache and ask intelligent questions about it. Coming at me like as a know-it-all who is going to school us is guaranteed to send you right out the door. Your type comes in thinking they know everything and you completely fuck everything up because you won't listen when those of us who built the damn thing tell you "don't do that, that'll break the production system".